Nagios, open source host/server/network monitoring software

Nagios® is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program. Where can you get it? Right here. Can you get support for it? Yes! Get more answers to some of your basicquestions about Nagios here.

Overview

Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own host and service checks

Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable

Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)

Optional escalation of host and service notifications to different contact groups

Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution

Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers

External command interface that allows on-the-fly modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party applications

Retention of host and service status across program restarts

Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages

Simple authorization scheme that allows you restrict what users can see and do from the web interface

License

Nagios is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. This gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify Nagios under certain conditions. Read the 'LICENSE' file in the Nagios distribution or read the online version of the license for more details. Nagios is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Developers

Who develops Nagios, you ask? Ethan Galstad is the creator and lead developer of the Nagios. The main Nagios plugin developers include Ton Voon, Benoit Mortier, Holger Wiess, and Thomas Guyot-Sionnest. Many other people have helped with this project over the years by contributing bug reports, patches, ideas, suggestions, addons, plugins, etc. A list of some of those contributors can be found here.

Support

This project is supported by the free time of its developers and followers. New users who need help have access to assistance through various channels: